Effect of deposition time on structural, optical and morphological properties of facing-target sputtered TiO2 thin film

The aim of this work is to deposit nanocrystalline TiO₂ films by DC reactive facing-target sputtering (FTS) technique. The TiO₂ films have been deposited in Fluorine doped tin-oxide (FTO) glass substrate by FTS with sputtering pressure of 2.0 Pa, and Ar/O₂ gas ratio of 7:3. The main attraction of this paper is to correlate the structural, optical and morphological properties of these prepared TiO₂ film with variation of deposition time (like 2, 4 and 12 hrs). The thickness of TiO₂ film increases with the increase of deposition time. The correlation between the thickness variance and the structural, optical and morphological properties of TiO₂ thin films has been investigated in details. From the results, it is cleared that the crystallinity, grain size and surface roughness enhance but cluster size reduces with the increase of deposition time. These prepared films have chanced to apply directly for dye-sensitized solar cell, photoelectrochemical cell and water splitting applications.